Remembering Our Fallen Leaders

Fifty years ago many people of my generation experienced a moment that would change their lives forever: our President was assassinated. Although John Fitzgerald Kennedy is not buried in a mausoleum, his burial spot in Arlington National Cemetery shows the importance of memorialization. Indeed, his grave is one of the most visited in the world.

What follows is my remembrance of that day.

On March 12, 1963, a troubled young man who identified himself as A. Hidell of Dallas, Texas clipped a coupon from the February 1963 issue of the American Rifleman magazine. That small coupon was for a surplus Italian made 6.5 X 52mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle sold by Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, Illinois. A. Hidell also added a cheap 4X scope to his order, put the coupon and a United States Postal Money Order for $21.45 (which included $1.50 for shipping) into an envelope, and mailed his order to Klein’s Sporting Goods. One week later, Klein’s shipped a package containing the gun and scope to A. Hidell, P.O. Box 2915 Dallas, Texas. The package was picked up in Dallas a few days later by the man calling himself A. Hidell.

His name real name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

On October 16th, Oswald got a job at the Texas School Book Depository, where he was described as an above average employee. On November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m., Lee Harvey Oswald, a.k.a. A. Hidell, methodically fired three shots through an open window on the sixth floor of that building. He then wedged the rifle between a stack of boxes and calmly walked down to the lunchroom on the second floor where all hell was breaking loose. Oswald got a soda and walked out the front door of the building at 12:33 p. m.

Those three shots, fired from an a surplus Italian made 6.5 X 52mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle sold by Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, Illinois, killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States of America.

Everyone has his or her own personal story of what happened next. It is seared into our individual and collective consciousness.

At the precise moment President Kennedy was shot, a lot of the kids at Lincoln Southeast High School were in the cafeteria; but owing to the large student population, we ate in shifts. I had already eaten. Instead, I was slumped at my desk watching the clock in Martin Buschkamp’s Guidance class. My desk was against the wall; the door was on my right several feet in front of me. In back of me was pretty Susan Jenkins. Mr. Buschkamp was sitting at his oak desk.

There was a slight knock on the door, then an extended hand crooked a finger and Mr. Buschkamp got out of his chair and walked to the door. We watched as he leaned though the doorway into the hallway where there was a hushed conversation. When he came back into the room, his face was somber and ashen.

“President Kennedy has been shot.” There was a collective gasp, followed by a number of rapid-fire conversations. Martin Buschkamp tried to calm his students down. The P.A. speaker that was high on the wall crackled to life. All conversations in the room stopped as we turned our eyes to look at the speaker. There was a sound of scraping and a radio being tuned as someone in the principal’s office positioned a portable radio in front of the microphone. Thirty seconds later we got the news: President John F. Kennedy was dead. There were screams. There were sobs. But mostly there were lots of faces frozen in open-mouthed silence. It was the gasping silence of loss.

And for me, and for most of my classmates, it was also the end of our childhood. What happened afterwards is a mosaic fog of images, sounds, silence, and emotion.

We were jostled from our shock at 12:55 when the bell sounded directing us to our next class, but none of us moved from our desks. Mr. Buschkamp’s eyes darted back and forth between the door, the P.A. speaker, and us. When nothing happened, he got up from his desk and cautiously opened the classroom door and peered out. When he saw that there was activity in the hall, he motioned us to get up.

One by one we arose from our desks and walked silently into the hall. Gone were the usual activities of locker door slamming, surreptitious flirting, and bravado shouting. The halls were eerily silent like someone had hit the mute button. There was little eye contact with our fellow students, and most of us walked while looking at the floor. We had no idea what to do, but at least we had a destination.

We went to our remaining two or three classes, sitting numbly listening to the static-y P.A. School was not dismissed, but regular classwork was impossible. What else could we do on a gray Friday afternoon after our President had been shot and killed? There is no set of internal or external instructions for such events. What happened at 12:30 p.m. was the stuff of the adult world, a world that was now ours too.

The next day was the Nebraska-Oklahoma football game at Memorial Stadium. In true Nebraska the-show-must-go-on football fashion the game was played with Nebraska upsetting Oklahoma 27-20 garnering the Big 8 Championship, and earning a trip to the Orange Bowl where they defeated Auburn 13-7.

There was no school the following Monday as we were glued to our televisions watching the funeral. Then school was cancelled for the rest of the week as the nation spent Thanksgiving wondering what to be thankful for. Newly sworn-in President Lyndon Baines Johnson tried his best to comfort the American people that day saying, “[we are] determined that from this midnight of tragedy we shall move toward a new American greatness.”

That ten-day gap between President Kennedy’s death and going back to school unknowingly gave each of us time to grieve in our own way. Nothing would ever be quite the same. Our childhood was now in the past.

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